Laptop hangs while in screen saver

I have an HP Spectre x360 15-ch0xx. Windows 10 Pro, version 20H2, OS build 19042.746. Since it was new, it's had a very annoying problem: it hangs while in the screen saver. I'll walk away from my desk for a while (an hour, overnight, whatever), and I come back to an unresponsive system. The fan is still running but that's it.

(I wrote about this once before: Laptop randomly hangs while in sleep mode)

I suspected the system was not dead, but just unresponsive. I installed the Chrome remote-access extension. This morning the system wouldn't wake up. I fired up the Chrome client, and shazam! There's the desktop. I could pan around and even click on things, though many things were unresponsive. Eventually the clicks quit working at all (even though the GUI indicated it had "heard" the click) and I had to power-cycle. I couldn't shut it down cleanly.

So Windows was still running, and the Chrome client was working, but much of the system was hung up.

Any guesses how I could fix this? I've already run through the "re-install every driver" drill several times without improvement, and obviously I've had many OS updates since posting about it 18 months ago.

Does it freeze up more often when on battery power or when plugged in?

I have seen similar but it was on a desktop.

You could log in remotely and the PC worked fine but nothing would appear on the screen that was attached to the PC.

Turned out it was a bad DVI cable and was not froze at all.

Probably not helpful since you have a laptop but the fact that you could remote in reminded me of a situation I had.

dekayd said:

Does it freeze up more often when on battery power or when plugged in?

I usually have it plugged in. I don't think it's ever frozen when on battery power.

I came across a possible fix that deals with numerous HP laptops freezing, but read it was mostly happening with HP laptops while on battery power. The fix was to change the power options by KC_SYD:
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebo...6016614/page/4

I read that you updated all your drivers, but have you updated the bios?
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers...le-pc/16779588

dekayd said:

I came across a possible fix that deals with numerous HP laptops freezing, but read it was mostly happening with HP laptops while on battery power.

Since I don't think it's ever frozen while on battery, and the description doesn't sound like my problem, I'll assume this doesn't apply to me.

I read that you updated all your drivers, but have you updated the bios?

Not to the one that was just released 2 months ago. I'm running BIOS version F.33 dated 6/12/20.

I have had a similar problem with an old laptop. Make sure that in the power options, sleep is set to never while on battery or plugged in. To solve the problem, I turned the screen saver to "off" and in power options selected to turn off the display after a certain time. The laptop will instantly turn on the display when any key is pressed. It's much more responsive than the screen saver and never hangs.


Kind regards
Chris

Chris Nicola said:

I have had a similar problem with an old laptop. Make sure that in the power options, sleep is set to never while on battery or plugged in.

So it NEVER sleeps??

To solve the problem, I turned the screen saver to "off" and in power options selected to turn off the display after a certain time. The laptop will instantly turn on the display when any key is pressed.

I already had those settings.